sakaki stepping down from gentoo-on-rpi-64bit (aka genpi64) maintenance (effective EOL notice)
Dear fellow Gentoo and RPi enthusiasts -
I am afraid I have some difficult news to share.
As some of you already know, the last few months have been very challenging for me in terms of bandwidth, because my current, "real-world" job has required increasing (and ultimately, unsustainable) amounts of my time, struggling to deliver a much increased workload with a skeleton staff post-lockdown. While I need to stay employed in this difficult environment, my family life has been coming under immense strain, and it became clear that
something had to give.
As a result, I have -- after much debate -- decided to accept a recent offer (which arrived unsolicited, and to my surprise) from another org to join them.
In many senses they offer a perfect fit, as the role is a lead architect position focused on post-quantum crypto for embedded systems, two of my real-world areas of practice, the org is world-renowned, and while the time commitment is still large, it is manageable.
However, it also comes at a significant (non-financial) cost, as their legals essentially prohibit me from contributing to external projects in my spare time to any material extent (sadly, this includes
genpi64; which they know all about... unsurprising, given who they are I guess ><).
Consequently, I must announce that
I will be stepping down as the maintainer for this project (and a number of others on GitHub, such as
raspbian-nspawn-64) with immediate effect. As I am the sole maintainer for these (and since, my bad, no real succession planning has been done), this effectively means these projects are going
EOL at this point.
For the meantime, I will leave the repos up (for historical interest and since they may be of use still in certain applications); however, there will be no further updates to the underlying
binhost etc.
(other than for the kernel autobuilds, which will remain running as they are entirely unattended atm; but, I will not attempt to fix them if they break). Nor will I be accepting/actioning further pull requests / bug reports from this point. Email requests for support will also have to be politely declined ><. I will continue to monitor this forum, but will be unable to provide in-depth technical responses to queries as before, and any responses may be somewhat delayed.
My sincere and heartfelt apologies to those who have contributed to, used and commented on genpi64 over the nearly four years since I first released it (seems such a long time ago now!). With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that I should have spent more time creating a maintenance community around this project (and others), but, in truth, I never expected it to gain the (modest!) popularity that it did; it was just a proof-of-concept that kind of grew...
Of course, this is
not the end in any sense for Gentoo on the aarch64 / 64-bit RPi platform, which remains very much a going concern (as you can see from the many active contributors on this forum). Also, given that the
custom overlay for gentoo-on-rpi-64bit is still available, you can (relatively easily) create your own 'downstream' Gentoo-based distro, if you so desire, and take up from where I am leaving off. If that piques your interest, please go for it!
In closing, I'd just like to note my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has used the image over the years, and to the fantastic team of devs and enthusiasts who make up the Gentoo and Raspberry Pi communities (a particular shout out to NeddySeagoon!). It's truly been an honour to be a (tiny!) part of those endeavours for a little while, and I hope genpi64 has helped, in some small way, to demonstrate that 64-bit Gentoo on systems such as the very capable RPi4 makes a lot of sense.
So, kind regards, stay well, and I trust our paths may cross again in the future ^-^
Sayounara!
It's been nice to be a bit lazy in this regard.
